This post has been submitted by Neil Patel. Neil is co-founder and CTO of ACS ) and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising.
The main reason most people use Feedburner is because it shows how many RSS subscribers they have. That might be a valuable metric to keep track of but there are certainly more things that can be done with Feedburner. By spending just 10 minutes a week analyzing certain Feedburner stats, it is possible to get an idea of how people are actually interacting with your blog so you can improve it.
If you look at the following image, you can see the most popular blog post I have written was: “Making your content Del.icio.us”. That post was written late on a Friday night, few people linked to it, and it did not do well on social sites like Del.icio.us. However, my RSS subscribers loved it.
The next image shows the least popular blog posts on Pronet Advertising. Many of these less popular blog posts were called ‘catchup’, which is a roundup of weekly news items. These catchup posts received a decent amount of visitors but it seems that the RSS subscribers weren’t sharing the love. After I noticed the trend I stopped writing them causing (partially) my RSS subscription rate to increase by roughly 16% in 30 days. Granted, there are probably other factors that caused the increase however I am sure that not writing those posts was a contributing factor.
By using Feedburner you can get an idea of which type of content is appealing most to your RSS subscribers. The key is to understand that just because a post receives tons of traffic or gets lots of comments, it doesn’t equate to your core audience loving it. If you want to increase the popularity of your blog, use some sort of RSS analytics to help you write content targeted towards the people who matter to you most; your loyal readers.
Read more from Neil Patel at Pronet Advertising.
